Armageddon

On the southern side of London the struggle between the Franco-Italian
armies and the troops of the Federation had been raging all night with
unabated fury along a curved line extending from Bexley to Richmond.

The railways communicating with the ports of the south and east had, for
their own purposes, been left intact by the commanders of the League;
and so sudden and utterly unexpected had been the invasion of the force
from America, and the simultaneous uprising of the British Section of
the Brotherhood, that they had fallen into the hands of the
Federationists almost without a struggle. This had enabled the invaders
and their allies to concentrate themselves rapidly along the line of
action which had been carefully predetermined upon.

Landing almost simultaneously at Southampton, Portsmouth, Shoreham,
Newhaven, Hastings, Folkestone, Dover, Deal, Ramsgate, and Margate, they
had been joined everywhere by their comrades of the British Section,
whose first action, on receiving the signal from the sky, had been to
seize the railways and shoot down, without warning or mercy, every
soldier of the League who opposed them.

What had happened at Harwich had at the same time and in the same
fashion happened at Dover and Chatham. The troops in occupation had been
caught and crushed at a blow between overwhelming forces in front and
rear. Added to this, the International was immensely stronger in France
and Italy than in Russia, and therefore the defections from the ranks of
the League had been far greater than they had been in the north.

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Tens of thousands had donned the red ribbon as the Signal flashed over
their encampments, and when the moment came to repel the assault of the
mysterious grey legions that had sprung from no one knew where, the
bewildered French and Italian officers found their regiments
automatically splitting up into squads of tens and companies of
hundreds, obeying other orders, and joining in the slaughter of their
former comrades with the most perfect sang froid. By daybreak on the 6th
the various divisions of the Federationists were well on their way to
the French and Italian positions to the south of London. The utmost
precautions had been taken to prevent any news reaching headquarters,
and these, as has been seen, were almost entirely successful

The three army corps sent southward by General le Gallifet met with a
ruinous disaster long before they came face to face with the enemy. Ten
of the fleet of thirty war-balloons which had been sent to co-operate
with them, had been manned and commanded by men of the International.
They were of the newest type and the swiftest in the fleet, and their
crews were armed with the strangest weapons that had yet been used in
the war. These were bows and arrows, a curious anachronism amidst the
elaborate machinery of destruction evolved by the science of the
twentieth century, but none the less effective on that account. The
arrows, instead of being headed in the usual way, carried on the end of
the shaft two little glass tubes full of liquid, bound together, and
tipped with fulminate.